Engaging with consumers + Branding = Content is king and filtering is gold
To engage a deep relationship with people, one has to provide content to discuss and relevant ideas to share. That are basics of relationship building. In the Internet sphere companies are subjected to this statement. Content generated by brands is smart and interesting when dealing with video or photo content since they have ability to create awesome ones, but when dealing with written content they’re not enough relevant according to consumers. Though that status, there’s still a powerful move for brands to make in order to be an online influential player.
Creating and spreading branded written content is always related to the brand and people may argue it is aimed at promoting the company, sending a negative brand image as well as lowering quality of this content (whether argument is legitimate or not). An other way is to aggregate content, create branded channels including influencers publicly known as non affiliated to the brand, to speak about the topic you’ve targeted. Here are 2 diagrams from Dan Roam explaining clearly this:
That strategy has 2 major added values: 1) you get organic SEO/ SEM from content you aggregated 2) you become influential and the brand is leaned against the specific topic you need. Get the example of AllTop created by Guy Kawasaki, it has become the gate to jump into any topic you need since the platform aggregate the best-in-breed sources to get information about. Companies should definitely jump into that bandwagon. Other examples are available over the web, and may companies are working on specific topics to gather interested consumers interesting for companies to get together. Have a Google search session and see by yourself what you can do.
Inspiration from the Guy Kawasaki blog
Photo Credit: Arkworld
